Assuming that you genuinely approve of this article, a seal of approval from a user with 50% positive karma is more like an anti-seal of approval, regardless of the validity of that user's statements. Most humans will be inclined to smack you down for grabbing status that they don't think you deserve, and they may even improperly use the quality and content of your comment as a substitute criterion for evaluating the quality and content of the parent article. It's not to say that you should refrain from commenting at all, but that you should refrain from commenting if your comments lack cues that will lead readers to evaluate your comments and their parents slowly and deliberatively. The easiest way to do this is to write comments that can only be written slowly and deliberatively and to refrain from commenting otherwise.

Assuming that you don't genuinely approve of this article, obscurantism and social engineering are unlikely to be productive and are discouraged.

At this point I am glad he posted. Clarity is still a member of the culture around here; even if he is not a good-karma scoring member, he still participates regularly and has valid opinions on things.

HN has a mechanism for giving an article your seal of approval: it's called upvoting. More than that is only necessary if you expect your approval specifically to weigh more highly than that of other users.

Seeing comments from (say) three people who explicitly say that they agree or think I've done a good work, feels much better than just seeing three upvotes on my comment / post. I know that there are other people who feel the same. Our minds aren't good at visualizing numbers.

I think that "if you are particularly happy about something, you can indicate this with an explicit comment in addition to the upvote" is a good norm to have. Giving people extra reward for doing particularly good work is good.

That's a reasonable point. (And I have no inkling why anyone thought you should be downvoted for making it.)

None the less, it seems to me that if you really find an article particularly impressive then you should almost always be able to find something more specific to say than "I like this", and that a better norm than "if you really like something, post a generic positive comment" would be "if you really like something, post a positive comment saying something about why you like it". More useful feedback, more discussion fodder, less clutter, and (because of the small extra effort required) I think a better indication of actually having liked something substantially more than usual.

There are many things that feel nice but that I prefer not to do in public without good reason :-).

Maybe I'm a starry-eyed idealist, or maybe I'm deceiving myself, but I don't think my comments on LW are mostly made with the goal of feeling nice. I'm trying to do something like overall utility maximization too.

Imagine for a moment that every article gets festooned with comments from all the LW regulars saying "I approve of this" or "I disapprove of this". Don't you think that would get in the way? Do you think it would add much value beyond just upvoting and downvoting?

If you have something interesting to say about why you approve or disapprove, or if your approval or disapproval comes with useful suggestions for improvement, or if you have reason to think that LW's readership will have a particular interest in your attitude (e.g., because you're a domain expert in whatever the post is about), then I can see the point. If you just want to say "yay!" or "boo!", though, that's exactly what the voting mechanism is for.

Sure. But "what if everyone did it all the time?" is a useful heuristic sometimes. Things that can't stand being universalized may be things better not done in the first place. (Not always, of course.)

This is making a mountain out of a molehill.

Continuing to argue about it further certainly would be :-). So I'll leave it here. (For the avoidance of doubt: I agree it's a molehill.)